Google Earth and Katrina help

Posted by John Hanke, Director, Google Earth and Maps

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast almost a year ago, people across the country and around the world wondered how to help. Many donated money; others lent their homes to dislocated survivors. A group of Googlers lent their expertise by leveraging the power of Google technology.

Over several long nights, the teams from Google Earth and Google Maps created satellite imagery overlays of the devastation in the affected region, which showed more accurately the scope of the disaster. Soon after, we were told that rescue workers and the U.S. Air Force were using Google Earth to find people who were stranded.

And last week, we received formal recognition from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Members of the NGA presented the "Hurricane Katrina Recognition Award" to the Google Earth team, as well as the Google Enterprise and Global Support groups, for their direct support during the Katrina disaster. Individual recipients included Brian McClendon, Andria McCool, Wayne Thai, Charlie Chapin, Michael Ashbridge, Chikai Ohazama, Lenette Howard, and Rob Painter, along with two folks from Carnegie Mellon University who assisted us: Randy Sargent and Anne Wright. We're pleased to be recognized in this way -- but even more pleased that we could help.

Summer health tips

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

Our esteemed Google doc, Taraneh Razavi, M.D., has kindly provided a few tips on coping with such summer challenges as tick bites, thunderstorms, and heat exhaustion. She's also blogged about insect repellents and sunscreen. But as she reminds us, summer also means - there's ice cream. Stay healthy and cool, people, and have fun this and every weekend.

Make your own buttons

Posted by Ben Lewis, Toolbar Product Manager

Custom Buttons are by far my favorite feature in the new Google Toolbar, which comes out of beta today. Clearly I’m not the only one, either -- we have over 600 buttons in the gallery, with new buttons being added every day -- and here are some some of my favorites, if you'd like to add them to your Toolbar. If you’re interested in making your own, it’s pretty easy. Just go to one of your favorite sites, right-click on the search box, and then click “Generate Custom Search.” You can find out how to add advanced features to your buttons here.

Lane's Gifts settlement ruling

Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel

We know many have you have been following the Lane's Gifts v. Google case, so we want you to know that Judge Joe Griffin ruled today to approve the proposed settlement. Here is his ruling. We're pleased Judge Griffin has affirmed the settlement as appropriate and fair to advertisers. We look forward to continuing to manage invalid clicks effectively and provide our advertisers with an outstanding return on their investment. If you're an advertiser, there's more about how the settlement applies to you here.

A roadmap for Google help

Posted by Suzanne Hampton and Terry Hurlbutt, Online Product Support Team

Those of us in user support had a pet peeve: there was no single place that held all of Google's help information at your fingertips. So we decided to build one -- and now you can visit Google Help to find tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions for just about every Google product and service. We don't want you to have to work hard to find anything, so we also added an A-Z guide in case you do know exactly what you're looking for.

From the Support page you can also visit the Help Center of your choice to discover answers to frequently asked questions and link to our interactive help groups to discuss various features with other Google users. So remember to keep google.com/support handy, and enjoy.

Freecol, VDrift, Sauer... heaven!

I'll start by noting I messed up my last post. Despite making the post on the 23rd, it was dated the 18th so any frequent readers may have easily missed it. So, for those who haven't yet read it, check out Freeciv3 Part I.

Freecol

Now, onto the real meat. In the last week, Freecol 0.5 was - at long last - released. The original colonization had a cult following and Freecol is only going to enhance that community. It's got a lot of potential. It's got some very nice visuals for a Free game and they're improving with every release.

I've been lazy here and used a screenshot from 0.4 since I'm at work and can't load it up to take a new one, although to me it looks the same in 0.5 for that part of the game.

The game is now very playable with plenty of depth but there's still a few negatives for me:

• The ugliness of Java does sneak through in places despite heavy UI customization. (God damn the default Java UIs are ugly - are Sun developers blind?)
• Sadly I'd forgotten how to play Colonization and there's no tutorial so I didn't get too far. Hopefully a tutorial will be added in a future version.
• The GUI tended to redraw quite slowly every time I closed a dialog.
• Usability needs reviewing e.g. when moving a unit, if it finishes it's move, the game switches to the next unit automatically. That makes it really easy to accidentally move units in the wrong direction by pressing a direction too many times with the previous unit.

Anyway, since 0.5 != 1.0, I look forward to improvements in upcoming releases.

VDrift scenery

Following up the VDrift release earlier this month, the VDrift team have provided an autopackage to help people get drifting. I tried the Windows install on my laptop with it's integrated not-really-3D card and VDrift looked like a toddlers colouring book - bright and messy. Can't blame them for that though, and it's not worth fixing so I can play at 3fps.

There are some screenshots from the latest VDrift. It is beginning to look absolutely beautiful.

In what could be a Free Gamer exclusive, I spotted an update to Sauerbraten. Entitled, "normalmap version", this release presumably focuses on the introduction of normal maps to Sauer's rendering capabilities.

There's an amusing exchange in that thread between Passa (a Sauer developer, I think) and Aardappel (the main Sauer developer), where Passa notes community confusion over to Sauerbraten's identity.

Passa:

On the community promotion Aardappel, I have been trying to convince my ISP to host a server for Sauerbraten.. unfortunately the general community say its just a Quake 3 clone..

Aardappel:

well, so we are improving.



- I started Cube as an advanced Wolfenstein 3D clone :P

- It was then perceived as a Doom clone

- Once we got the really HQ maps like metl3 it was perceived as Quake 1, sometimes even Quake 2 Clone

- Sauer started life as looking like a Quake 2 clone

- Then with the better maps people thought it looked more like Quake 3

- and now with the bump maps I have heard comparisons with Quake 4!!!



So hey, even though people can't get it in to their thick skull that there are other things besides quake out there, and that this is not some kind of lame based on quake source project, we are certainly moving forward!

Sauerbraten isn't half bad for a Quake 3 clone.

What!??! ;-)

London conference on test automation

Posted by Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager

Earlier we announced a first-time conference on test automation, something of interest to an admittedly select group. Just a reminder to those of you who work in this area that our deadline for requesting a spot at the London meeting this fall is coming up at the end of the week. Here's more information if you'd like to sign up.

Corporate info on the go

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

In keeping with the blog's mobile theme today, we've just made enterprise information -- corporate networks, databases, content management systems -- searchable on mobile devices. You can read more here.

Home on the road

Posted by Maryam Kamvar, Software Engineer

It may be liberating to step away from your computer and out into the world -- but who can stand to leave the convenience of the Internet behind? I like to take the information I need with me -- like news, weather, Gmail, and everything else from my Google Personalized Homepage -- and now so can you. Before you take off, customize your mobile home page from your computer. On your Personalized Homepage, decide what you want to add to your phone, then drag and drop to reorder the items. On the road, in line, or wherever you go, you can view all this information on your phone. The world is waiting!

Saving the galaxy, one traffic jam at a time

Posted by Josh Sacks, Software Engineer

Is it wrong to refer to your own handiwork as "the new hotness"? Probably, but we're hoping you'll humor us for a bit. So what is with the new Google Maps for mobile? Well, to paraphrase Agent J:

Old and busted: Being stuck in traffic
The new hotness: Checking traffic conditions from your phone*

Old and busted: Showing up late
The new hotness: Driving directions with real-time traffic estimates

Old and busted: Typing in the same addresses over and over
The new hotness: 1-touch recall of favorite locations and routes

This release won't avert an intergalactic disaster any time soon, but we'd like to think the Men in Black would give it a try. You can too: just point your mobile phone's web browser to www.google.com/gmm.

*Update: Currently available across the U.S. with comprehensive data coverage for more than 30 metro areas; partial coverage elsewhere in U.S.

Freeciv3? Part I

There was an interesting discussion over on the Freeciv mailing lists on the goals of the project.

Freeciv developer Per started the conversation by stating what he believes is the main obstacle to Freeciv development at the moment, the clash between single player and multiplayer goals:

We can make a very good single player game... Or we can create a game that is fun in multiplayer... Because once we need to take into account the needs of higher amounts of players and a competitive and possibly hostile environment, the needs of single player must suffer...



...we must decide which is more important, single player or multiplayer.



I have no problem saying single player is more important... [since] multiplayer is inherently broken and unfixable without a redesign making multiplayer the priority.

He goes on to give more justification in the email for his beliefs, which I completely agree with. I do not, however, agree with the conclusion that only one of single player or multiplayer aspects can be effectively achieved.

To start with, there are reasons like this that I think are flawed:

The ban on modal dialogs has improved multiplayer significantly, but along with timeout and the undeclared ban on pausing the game to display information, it rules out many ways of displaying information to the player that can be highly beneficial for single player.

To me, that is a broken implementation. Messaging should be abstracted, thereby giving the option of both modal and non-modal implementations (or varieties on both). It should be a preference that is dependent on the context (in this case, whether the game is single player or multiplayer). It is both simple to design and implement if the codebase is sufficiently organised - that is, if the UI is independent of the game logic. Like this pseudo code:

private void some_game_logic = function() {

  Message.UserDialog("some_action", SIMPLE_MESSAGE);

}



public abstract class Message {

  public abstract Message GetMessage();

  public void UserDialog(string msg, int type) {

    switch (type) {

      case SIMPLE_MESSAGE:

        // set single close button

        Display();

        break;

      // other cases

    }

  }

}

Then implement a modal version that blocks until the dialog is closed, and a non-modal version that returns instantly and displays the dialog using a different thread.

The more important obstacles to Freeciv as a game are better identified by 'saywhat':

AIUI "good game design" involves boiling down a lot of game
elements until you're left with only the essentials. Elements which
dilute the fun are thrown out; elements which give the player "fun"
(in the form of interesting choices) are kept in.

He basically goes on to state that Freeciv attempts to handle too much by scaling the gameplay. Lost a city? Build a city. Got space? Build more cities. Bigger is better and once you have Democracy, there's nothing but positives to having an expansive empire. Roads and railroads are, once built, cost free, so build them everywhere.

I think the problem with the Civilisation genre of games as a whole is that they do not take how empires rise and fall as they have done in history. All empires that have tried to grow too much have imploded, then often risen again as smaller but more solid cultures. The Romans? Now the Italians. Persia? Now Iran. The British Empire? Now the UK and Commonwealth (which is losing it's relevance). The USSR? Now a flagging smaller Russia.

Freeciv would be better at looking at ways to make growing too big problematic. It needs to turn what is a race-to-grow game into a more tactical use-others-best game. Focus less on building and more on cooperating. Make growth painful. Quite simply, large cities should be nigh impossible to support without certain technologies. Look at how corrupt Rome was, for instance.

There are suggestions in that discussion at limiting growth by making it more difficult to found cities by making settlers more difficult to come by. I don't like this approach as it is introducing a limitation when the team should be looking at ways to address the flaws that make large civilisations too powerful and too easy to manage.

I think they need to start looking at more radical ways to change Freeciv. In fact, I think they should consider distinctively non-Civ changes to the gameplay, giving Freeciv it's own identity as a game. I say they should draft Freeciv3 as a total departure from standard Civilization and leave Freeciv2 as the Civ-like implementation.

I shall introduce my ideas for Freeciv3 in a follow up article. Please post any ideas you have!

Findings on invalid clicks

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager, Trust and Safety

Those of you who follow news about online advertising closely are seeing plenty about the issue of "click fraud" lately. Since there's been a development in a case Google is involved in, you might like to hear about it.

As part of the settlement in the click-fraud case Lane’s Gifts v. Google, we agreed with the plaintiffs to have an independent expert examine our detection methods, policies, practices, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not we had implemented reasonable measures to protect all of our advertisers. The result of that is a 47-page report, written by Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Professor of Information Systems at NYU. The report was filed with the court in Texarkana, Arkansas, this morning.

The bottom-line conclusion of the report is that Google’s efforts against click fraud are in fact reasonable. At several points in his report, he calls out the quality of our inspection systems and notes their constant improvement. It is an independent report, so not surprisingly there are other aspects of it with which we don’t fully agree. But overall it is a validation of what we have said for some time about our work against invalid clicks.

Here are excerpts of some of the positive things Dr. Tuzhilin has to say about Google and invalid clicks:

“During this project, I visited Google campus three times and interviewed over a dozen of the Click Quality team members from the Spam Operations and the Engineering groups, as well as the Product Manager of the Trust and Safety Group. I found the members of both groups to be well-qualified and highly competent to perform their jobs. Most of them have relevant prior backgrounds and strong credentials.” (p.4)

“The current set of Google filters is fairly stable and only requires periodic 'tuning' and ‘maintenance’ rather than a radical re-engineering, even when major fraudulent attacks are launched against the Google Network.” (p.25)

“These inspection systems have been developed by Google over an extensive period of time and are constantly improved to extend their functionality and make them better for the investigators to do their inspections more effectively. I have personally observed several such inspections and can attest to how successfully they have been conducted by Google’s investigators. This success can be attributed to (a) the quality of the inspection tools, (b) the extensive experience and high levels of professionalism of the Click Quality inspectors, and (c) the existence of certain investigation processes, guidelines and procedures assisting the investigators in the inspection process.” (p. 40)

“Google has built the following four 'lines of defense' for detecting invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.” (p. 47)

We also filed a document with the court today that may be of interest. You can find it here. And there's more information on invalid clicks and how we manage them here and here.

Some Cool Game Updates

UFO:AI

Hot off the press is the 2.0 rc3 release from the UFO:AI team, which is shaping up as a flagship open source game after it briefly floundered due to developer desertion last year. This is another example of why indie games being open source is a Good Idea (tm). Had this been closed source, the promising initial release (tech demo 1) would have the end of the line. Fortunately it was the beginning of an era.

Another important Free strategy game was updated today - Warzone Resurrection. If you haven't played this yet, I don't know what you are waiting for. It's about as polished as you will come across for an open source game, mainly due to it's commercial roots.

When it rains, it pours. TA:Spring, the advanced Total Annihilation engine, was updated on the 17th to version 0.72b1. The changelog is impressive, with the main new features being a new shield system and custom explosions, both mainly for modders. I'm hopeful that TA:Spring will turn into a respectable standalone game in it's own right based on some of the budding mods. I know you can play it without the original TA but I hope they really back and bundle some officially.

There was also another major update to TA3D, a friendly competitor to TA:Spring. I haven't researched the difference between the two but I get the impression the latter is at a more advanced stage of development.

Automanic

In a departure from the tactical flavour of this post, the promising Carmageddon-alike Automanic saw it's second official release, achieving version 0.2 earlier in the week. I'm really enjoying the progress of Automanic, especially after seeing promising games like Slickworm and DIE stagnate and, er, die. I hope that a community builds around it and keeps development alive and kicking.

The original Carmaggedon was awesome and it would be great to top it and improve on the genre with a Free game. I hope the Automanic developers avoid the dreaded rewrite bug that tends to kill off a lot of open source games. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Update: Google Desktop Gadget Contest

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Just a quick update to let all you know that, due to popular demand, we've extended the Google Desktop Gadget Contest another two weeks. So if you have a great idea for a gadget, and want to enter it for a chance to prove your brilliance and creativity, you now have until August 14 to do so.

And if you're interested in some tips and tricks on creating Desktop Gadgets, have a look at the Inside Google Desktop blog. Good luck!

Finding easy-to-read web content

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

Like most of you, when I search the web, I want to find relevant information with a minimal amount of distraction. But because I can't see and I use a device that converts web text to speech, I'm even more in tune with the distractions that can sometimes get in the way of finding the right results. If the information I'm after is on a visually busy page, I have to sort through that page to find the text I want--an extra step that can sometimes be very time-consuming.

That's why I've been passionate about a project I'm working on at Google called Google Accessible Search. Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google's search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the http://labs.google.com/accessible site, they'll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully--that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op's technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

This is still an early-stage experiment, and we hope to improve the product's quality over the next few months based on user feedback. Check it out over on our Labs page and tell us what you think.

Stocking up

Posted by Navneet Loiwal, Software Engineer, Google India

A few months ago we launched Google Finance. Since then, we've listened carefully to your feedback and learned a lot about what you like and what you don't like about our product. And in response to these requests, we're pleased to announce a few small new features, including a stock-market module on the business section of Google News and support for multiple portfolios. We've also added an auto-suggest feature to the search box to help you find the companies and funds you're searching for more quickly, as well as an auto-refresh feature that keeps the data on your portfolio page current. In addition, rumor has it that a lot of users like to have the choice of reading message boards in reverse chronological order. So we've made sure our discussion groups have that feature, too. Lastly, it's earnings season, and we've been impressed by a small company called SeekingAlpha that offers free transcripts on many earnings calls, so we've added links to them.

These are small steps, and you can expect to see more features and ideas from us in the coming months. We appreciate your feedback and hope you'll continue to push us to make Google Finance better.

Essential Open Source Tools for Windows

Windows is not a platform oft associated with open source software, but we can not escape from the fact that the majority of computers world-wide run it as the primary operating system. Free game developers mostly seem to run a Linux variant, but there is an increasing number of developers on Windows who are coming around to the open source mentality without subscribing to the need to run Linux.

Some of the tools a developer will use are dictated by the chosen programming language. Outside of that, here is a run-down of my favourite tools for developing on Windows, most of which I use on a daily basis as part of my day job.

All of these programs are Free Software.

Planning

Got ideas? Freemind helps you "mind map" them into a tangible format. I find Freemind incredibly useful for both existing and new projects. It helps you intuitively organise your thoughts and I use it for developing feature plans as well as iterating new ideas into a coherent state.

When I have more definite plans and I want to create diagrams to visualise or document processes, I use Dia. It can be especially useful for helping others understand what your code is supposed to do by providing a process diagram.

Development (Editors)

I find Notepad++ to be indispensible. This multi-purpose editor has an impressive set of features yet a very small footprint and loads nearly instantly. I use it for quickly viewing and editing most source code, and use it exclusively for any kind of web design work. I even find myself missing this editor when I use my Linux machines!

WinMerge, a visual diff and merge tool, is great for comparing edited code. I often duplicate code bases to work on a specific feature in each and WinMerge is the simple solution for reviewing what I have done.

While the combination of Notepad++ and WinMerge cover all my basic development needs. If I really need a heavyweight IDE, I can rely on Eclipse. For something inbetween Notepad++ and Eclipse, you could try JEdit.

Development Tools

Some people find SCM tools a little intimidating. Those people have not yet used TortoiseSVN which makes working with SVN about as simple as SCM gets. It integrates directly into Windows explorer and is another tool that I really miss when I work on Linux.

Unimpressed by the compressed folders Windows offers as a way to represent zip files, I found 7-zip which takes care of all my file [de]compression and archiving needs. It handles pretty much any format going (including .rar and .tar.gz) which can be handy in this multi-archive-format world we live in.

And of course there is PuTTY. This ssh utility is simple but, "does what it says on the tin."

I used to use Cygwin a lot but began to find it more frustrating than productive and often using it when I would have been better researching Windows-oriented replacements.

Graphics

A lot of Free games use pixel art. For this, there is no better tool than JDraw, which totally focuses on the manipulation of pixels. If you want simple art or just want to refine your smaller images, this is the tool for you.

For more complex art there is Inkscape and GIMP. Inkscape is emerging as one of the leading vector graphics editors, surpassing it's commercial counterparts in many areas. [The curiously named] GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) is the open source equivalent to the popular Photoshop. Whilst the debate on which UI approach is better will never end, recent versions of GIMP have greatly enhanced it's usability and it is a very advanced, capable, and reliable image editor.

Communicating

I use HydraIRC for logging onto FreeNode. HydraIRC is the best open source IRC client for Windows that I could find. It is decent although a little rough in some ways. FreeNode is the first place to go if you want to get involved in the open source scene. Most notable Free Software projects have a channel there and you can often talk to the developers directly.

GAIM is good for instant messaging and can also be used for IRC.

Missing!

I have not yet found a decent open source task tracker for Windows. Anything I have encountered has either been web-based (I'm not looking to share) or not open source.

Please leave comments with any other tools you think I've missed out.

More Upcoming Releases

There is a release imminent for Mars: Land of No Mercy, which got it's own .org domain name recently. This isometric strategy mech game is developing at a steady pace and sees version 0.1.2 released next week.

New Ecksdee Level

The next version of Ecksdee is shaping up nicely. There's some preview screenshots of a new level for the next version (0.0.9) one of which can be seen here. There's another level in development which is more ambitious and targeted for the 0.1 release of Ecksdee. The Ecksdee developers will be at the Crystal Space conference this weekend in Aachen, Germany. An Ecksdee talk should take place on Sunday at 1pm local time.

There's another stunt-like Free game on the horizon: Sturmbahnfahrer. The game describes itself as, "Simulated obstacle course for automobiles." As such, the gameplay is oriented around using physics to complete the levels rather than racing.

There's a curious new freeware game based on OGRE. The Blob sees the player taking on the role of a blob of paint who must, it seems, paint the city of Utrecht. There are screenshots galore in the OGRE featured projects section. Sadly it seems to be Windows-only and you'll need a 2ghz PC.

Finally I'll round by with the Planeshift release. This iteration on the 0.3 "Crystal Blue" version squashes many bugs, adds optimizations, and introduces features such as improved item crafting, item decay, new spells, and improved character handling. Read the 0.3.015 changelog for more details.

"Let click fraud happen"? Uh, no.

Posted by Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety

You may have seen some of the media coverage generated by a blogger's quoting Eric Schmidt about click fraud. By using select excerpts and ignoring the context of the remarks, that blog post made for an interesting read, but was unfortunately misleading.

Eric spoke at a SIEPR economics event at Stanford in March. At the end of his remarks he took questions. (You can view the whole presentation and Q&A that followed here.)

Here's the relevant question Eric was asked about click fraud: "Recently there’s been some talk about click fraud being a potential threat to the entire advertising business model. I was just wondering what your thoughts on that were and if there’s an economic solution to it more than just technical solutions."

Eric made clear from the very beginning that he wasn't describing our approach to click fraud and was answering hypothetically. He introduced his answer by saying: "Let’s imagine for purposes of argument that click fraud were not policed by Google and it were rampant ..."

The "let it happen" excerpt followed, in which he discusses the economic forces that can retard click fraud: "Eventually the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So, over some amount of time, the system is, in fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen."

But he made clear that we don't take that approach, by adding that click fraud is "a bad thing and because we don’t like it, and because it does, at least for the short-term, creates some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try to detect it and eliminate it." He also said, "In Google's case, we worry about this a lot and we have a number of technical engineers who think that this is great fun to try to go ahead of this and get ahead of it."

The fact is that Google strives to detect every invalid click that passes through its system, and to prevent those clicks from ever reaching an advertiser's account. And Eric and many others at Google have discussed the problem of invalid clicks publicly many times -- on our quarterly earnings calls, at our Press Day, and in other places, such as blogs. Anyone who has followed Google knows that Eric, and others at Google, have stated several times that Google fights invalid clicks, that we've devoted significant resources to manage it, and that we take it very seriously.

Update: Added link to the original story.

VDrift - More Cars & Tracks

There's a significant update to VDrift, the open source drift racing game. Now it has a decent selection of cars and tracks, 19 and 12 respectively, to play on and development seems to be picking up pace. This is an excellent game and I urge any people interested in racing games to get involved. With a bit of community dedication this could be turned into a really polished commercial quality racing game.

At the moment they are looking for people to post screenshots. There is only a binary for Linux of the latest release but I'm sure other platforms will follow sooner rather than later.

Loose Cannon is a 3d Gauntlet-style post modern shoot-em-up. The previous release (0.4) was promising but shaky. I'll have to see what this update is like.

I see Eternal Lands has had an update too. I've known about this update for a couple of weeks, just forgot to post about it. Still, I'm not an EL fan. I don't really understand what motivates people to play a game where the main focus is on harvesting - that is, your character sat down with numbers occasionally popping up over their heads representing improvements or gained goods. Still, I have a friend addicted to EL so it can't be that bad, it's just not for me.

I was quite interested to see Dune Legacy make an appearance on the Linux Game Tome. I remember playing Dune II back in 1992 and really enjoying it's gameplay. I then remember playing Command and Conquer and noticing how they'd improved the graphics but the gameplay was always essentially the same.

Then, eight years later, out came Dune 2000. It still had identical gameplay to Dune II, right down to some of the real playability bugs (units not always defending themselves, especially if you accidentally set them shooting the floor - they'll craterise the landscape whilst being picked off by weaker enemies) just it had pretty 3D graphics. I was disgusted. Now I see references to it being a remake of Dune II, but at the time I remember otherwise and recall an interview with the lead developer describing how innovative they were being.

It's always great to see game innovation and Dune II was amazing for it's time. It's always dismaying to see a company like Westwood then become so unoriginal. It's like they sacked all the people with decent ideas. One of the great things about Free games is you don't see people sinking into a wash-rinse-repeat development schedule pumping out meaningless titles that stick to the same formula after a decade. Unconstrained by commercial handcuffs where the priority is the money and not the game, people work on what they believe makes a good game.

Are recent C&C releases still as pathetic? Still based on gameplay that hasn't really changed since 1992?

Freecol vs Swecol

The 0.5 release of Freecol is imminent! I've been looking forward to this. Freecol is one of the best looking open source games with a very artistic interface. This will be the first really playable version of Freecol, and as such I expect it to take off as a project after this point. Good open source games always have a critical mass point where they blossom from one or two man efforts into community driven projects. This, I feel, is that point for Freecol.

However, there is a twist! Well, I'm just being dramatic, but another Colonization project has cropped up. Proclaiming to be Colonization II, copyright violations withstanding, Swecol2 profresses to be an open source sequel to the 1994 classic. There is even a teaser trailer.

On the face of things, Swecol2 looks promising despite being graphically (and seemingly gameplay-wise) inferior to Freecol. However, there is some cynism about and the fact that this is not yet open source makes is cause for suspicion:

...this is an open source project (the code will be released later on, right now it's [too] embarrassing to show anyone our code).

Still, I'm not trying to discourage a prospective Free game. I just feel developers should be open if they are going to be open source... it keeps people's expectations on a level with the reality of the game. Teasing players with trailers and promises of classic game sequels should be backed up by downloadable code so people can see what is going on.

In a slight departure from games, I'm going to mention Notepad++. If you use Windows, especially if you develop anything on Windows, this is an indispensable replacement for classic Notepad/Wordpad as well as an excellent lighter substitute for heavier IDEs. Notepad++ combines a small footprint with tons of features such as tabs and syntax highlighting. Really, I don't think I could stand using Windows without it. Wusers, check it out right now! I'll go as far as saying it's the best multi-purpose editor I've ever used on any platform.

Dedication's What You Need

...if you wanna be a record breaker! Oooo ooo... </singing>

One of the great things about Free software games is that people are free to dedicate themselves to whatever makes them happy. Check out this ship, the Atlantia, created for a Vega Strike mod [not yet published].

Speaking of Vega Strike, the musings over the last couple of weeks suggest a new 0.4.x release [the current engine] later on in the year. I don't think the real juice [the 0.5 OGRE-based engine] will come until 2007, but when it does it will be good. Check out the screenshot to the right, a sample of planet shaders that VS developer klauss is working on. More images here.

That's simply beautiful.

There's a new dungeon game in town. Sadly it is a Doom 3 mod so it's not really free, but we know what happens with iD engines so there is hope! The game is Dungeon Doom and hopefully it will evolve into a stellar Free game in the future.

Another interesting mod [UT2004 this time] is Air Buccaneers. It looks innovative but again is based on a non-free engine. I wish people would create mods for free engines like Sauerbraten. Can you imagine the syndicated power of mod developers being focused on Free Software engines? If only I could control people's minds, the world would be a better place.

I tried a few games today.

Secret Maryo Chronicles is a high resolution remake of old-school Super Mario. It's fun for a bit but I don't have the patience to learn levels like I used to when I was younger. The game has no music and the way Maryo responds to controls doesn't quite feel right. Some parts of the game look great while others look distinctly amateur, but it has a lot of potential.

Ri-Li is a cross between a wooden train set and Snake. It's probably more aimed at kids, but the gameplay seems to get very hectic very quickly. Also I could swear that the train does not always go the direction you tell it to go. I tried pressing before junctions, pressing at junctions, pressing both before and at junctions, or just holding down the direction, and it felt hit-and-miss.

Then I tried Pang Zero and Don Ceferino Hazaña. The gameplay of both games revolves around throwing up a dagger or spear to pop balloons (?) that bounce around the screen and kill you on-touch. It's like a simpler version of asteroids. Don Ceferino is the more entertaining and polished of the two, even if the gameplay is essentially the same, with a nicely presented story despite the awful spilleng mistakes.

The Don Ceferino website is all in Spanish. I hate to say it, but the language of the Net is English. If you want maximum recognition and traffic, you had better translate your musings. Otherwise obscurity and International exile loom for your project.

Code Jamming in Dublin

Posted by Jeanne Williams and Anne Driscoll, Staffing Programs Team

On June 29th, Google Dublin hosted the onsite finals for Code Jam Europe 2006. This is the third of four code competitions slated for this year, with China in January, India in April and a Global Code Jam this fall.

After nearly 10,000 registrants and three intense online rounds, the top 50 finalists persevered and flew to Dublin for the final challenge. ACM members also joined the coding community fun, traveling from countries as far afield as Kazakhstan, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, Spain, France, Poland and Bulgaria to celebrate the success of the finalists. Several of the ACMers had qualified for the Code Jam Finals in their own right, and having them in Dublin added a real buzz to the proceedings.

Over 15 countries were represented in the finals, and 31 of the top 50 are from Eastern Europe. We celebrate the success of the top finishers: Tomasz Czajka from Poland took home the €2500 grand prize; second- and third-prize winners were Petr Mitricheve and Roman Elizarov, both from Russia, who won €1000 each.

Watch the fun that defined Code Jam Europe in this short clip from the 3-day event -- and keep on coding to prepare for the next one!

Tour de France goes 3D with Google Earth

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

I don't know about you, but with the action and excitement heating up in the Tour de France, it's hard to keep track of exactly where everybody is riding. When you're trying to understand the Herculean effort that these cyclists go through in stages like L'Alpe d'Huez, or which streets in Paris the final stage will pass through, 2D maps just aren't as compelling.

But now you can make sense of it all by flying around the route yourself. A new KML file available on the official Tour de France website lets you see the entire course overlaid on satellite imagery for Google Earth.

This special Google Earth tour is available in French, German, and Spanish as well as English. Pick your language on the Le Tour site, and once you've done that, look for the "Tour on Google Earth" link in the lefthand navigation under Route. Then you can see the starts, the finishes, even information on each of the cities along the way. Just move the KML file into your "My Places" folder on Google Earth, and follow along day by day. (Did you know that Huy has the unique privilege of hosting stages for the Tour de France, the Giro and the Tour of Belgium this year? We didn't either.)

Be sure to try out the tilt feature to see the truly daunting magnitude of all of those climbs where riders are battling it out in this year's wide-open race. "Beyond Category" climbs? No thanks -- we'll stick to the flats and leave those verticals to the pros!

Armchair travel with Google Pack

Posted by Hannah Tang, Software Engineer

Even though I've lived in one city my entire life, I've always loved to travel and experience all the languages and cultures around the world. So it's been exciting to be a member of the team responsible for making Google Pack available internationally.

I'm happy to tell you that starting today Google Pack is available in Australia,
Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the U.K. It includes a batch of useful software like Picasa (for organizing your vacation photos), and Firefox (for safer web browsing). And it comes with Google Updater, which keeps all the Pack programs current so you don't have to. Maybe with all the time you save, you can do some travelling of your own.

Dark Days

I came across Zak McKracken and the Alien Rockstars the other day. It's a GPL cross-plaform fan-made sequel to Zak McKracken, a Lucasarts game. Whilst browsing for information on Zak1, I came across another ZM sequel, Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space. It looks even better than ZMAR, but is Windows only and seemingly only freeware. There's a rather impressive trailer available. It reminds me a little of the also-impressive The Silver Lining project (formerly known as King's Quest 9).

Simutrans

In other freeware news, Simutrans version 0.89 is now available. It's a preview release but this game is constantly moving forward and seems to update every few weeks, a practise I approve of. There's also a rather funky hand drawn "sketch" graphics set for Simutrans, shown in the screenshot here.

A topic I would like to cover more in the future is the sharing of content between Free game developers. Since volunteer resources are predictably limited, a way of getting more quality into Free games is to share good art between projects. People will disagree with the concept, thinking that it makes game content less unique and hence the game less individual, but I think that's an asinine perspective to take when game media should compliment gameplay rather than define it.

I came across Low Poly Co-operative, an initiative to create quality low-poly models for use in open source games. If you really need models then you can request them in their forum.

Recently due to job commitments I have been forced to return to the dark forests of Dr Demon. Fortunately there are friends in this forsaken place. I have come across Notepad++, a Scintilla-based editor that really makes modifying web pages a joy rather than a chore. I heartily recommend it.

It will be worthwhile, at some point, doing a special on various editors and compilers that power the Free game creator.

We get letters (4)

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

Our inbox is filled with stories from people who tell us how they use Google, and occasionally we feature these stories here. If you have a noteworthy tale, write to us.

In the world of marketing, there's always keen interest in knowing what the "target customer" does with the company's products. What are these people really like? How do they use our products?

Well, now we know about one in detail. Meet Alex, age 12. She just completed 6th grade in the Seattle area. And she wrote this essay for her class. If we made Alex up, you wouldn't believe us, so take a moment to read her report yourself.

Her dad Bill wrote to say that Alex "just totally loves doing research on the web and playing with making web sites. She did a cyber camp a couple of years ago, but most of what she knows comes from her mom" (who at the time led development of an online commerce business).

What's more, Bill goes on to say, Alex "has just discovered geocaching" and he adds "I started teaching her python as a first programming language this winter, but she got bored until I could figure out how to do some visual stuff that was more engaging than console read/writes :-)." He also notes that she "just discovered usability studies, and has been seen "flipping through one of her mom's several books on web design, engaging the reader, and ecommerce. Her dream job when she grows up is to be a technical program manager or web designer."

To us, the ideal Google user sounds a bit like Alex - resourceful, keen to try new things, and clearly, someone who appreciates ease of use. So we're really pleased that a number of our services meet her needs.

By the way - she got 106/100 for her essay (extra points for writing technique). Nice work, Alex! And a happy holiday weekend to our American readers. We'll see you next week.